Convoluted human evolution:Red Deer Cave people (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 19, 2015, 12:10 (3263 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: The early Homo tree keeps growing. It is like an explosion of human precursor forms, and supports my contention that humans were the purposeful endpoint of evolution.-Dhw:The more precursor forms there are, the less likely it seems to me that your God had it all planned. If there was a direct line from ape to human, you would be saying: “Look, the arrow of purpose!” You have admitted you don't know why God designed the weaverbird's nest and the parasitic jellyfish when his aim was to produce humans. Will you now perhaps say you don't know why God chose to design all these different human forms when he only really wanted one, but that's what happened, and so that proves that he only really wanted one (although you don't know why he designed all the others)? But perhaps I am being unfair, and you have a more convincing explanation.-DAVID: Remember all this profuse shower of pre-humans occurred 6-8 million years ago. I view it like a Cambrian explosion of hominins, supported by my thought that the challenges presented by nature at that time, or since, did not require that it was 'necessary' for humans to ever appear.-I have reproduced the whole of my argument, since your response misses the point that the diversity of hominins runs COUNTER to your proposal that God planned homo sapiens all along. We know there was an explosion of hominins. We know there was no challenge from Nature that made it ‘necessary' for ANY multicellular organism to appear, since bacteria have survived since the year dot. Challenges from Nature only require adaptation. Innovation requires the drive for improvement, and that applies to every new species, not just humans. So back we go: If God's purpose was to create humans, why did he design the weaverbird's nest and the parasitic jellyfish? You don't know. If his purpose was to create homo sapiens, why did he create homo australopithecus/habilis/erectus/ denisovan/neanderthalensis? If you don't know, once more you can hardly say the explosion supports your contention that they all served your God's purpose of producing ONE species.